March 5, 2025, by uazawm

On trial: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Part II & British Library Newspapers: Part VI

We are pleased to announce trial access to two newspaper collections:

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Part II and British Library Newspapers: Part VI.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers represents the largest single collection of early modern English news media available from the British Library and includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period.

Part II consists of entirely new full-colour scans of the original volumes in the British Library. Items in this new collection include:

• ‘Missing’ Burney: items from within the Burney collection which were not included in the original microfilm when the digital collection was created, comprising more than 9,000 pages. With Part II, these lost pages are now available to explore.
• ‘Additional Burney’: items outside of the original ‘core’ Burney collection, more seventeenth- and eighteenth-century century newspaper titles and issues, that were marked by the British Library as “Add.Burney”. It adds more than 100 new titles, including the Public Hue and Cry, and 130 expansions to titles in Part I of Burney.

British Library Newspapers: Part VI: Ireland, 1783-1950 has been selected to represent a range of perspectives, both national and provincial; some aiming for objective coverage, some as publications directly tied to certain perspectives or allegiances. Many of the newspapers in this archive have not been digitized before, allowing researchers to construct new and original analysis by offering voices that have been marginalized in previous discourse.

Researchers can track:

• Protestantism and Catholicism in Ireland,  including the ‘Protestant Ascendency’, the ‘hidden Ireland’, Unionism, and Catholic emancipation
• Social and economic issues, such as the experience and consequences of famines, the ramifications of the Land Wars, and the Irish National Land League
• Political developments and divides, including the emergence of movements such as Nationalism, Fenians, Parnellism; the debates around Home Rule and the ‘Irish Question’; and emergent ideologies like Redmondism
• Cultural shifts and identity building, such as the Irish Diaspora and the issues resulting from mass emigration, and the Irish Literary Revival
• Conflicts and their consequences, including the 1916 Easter Rising, Irish Independence, partition, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Civil War, and the impact of the First World War

The greatest overlap is with Parts I-V of the British Library Newspapers  of the British Library Newspapers series, expanding the views beyond the English press, and offering a counterpoint to them. It also complements the existing Irish newspapers that appear in Parts I, III, and IV. Beyond this archive, it complements the Nineteenth Century U.K. Periodicals series, giving the press perspective compared to the general and specialist publications available there.

The trials run until 31st March 2025

Do let us know what you think. Please send your feedback to the Libraries Collections team: collections@nottingham.ac.uk

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